1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a method for determining the orientation of Chinese words and, in particular, to a method for determining the orientation of Chinese words using the projection of the Chinese words in the vertical or horizontal direction.
2. Related Art
Currently, the technique of optical character recognition (OCR) has been widely used for building large-size literature database and making electronic business documents. Using the OCR technique, paper documents can be readily transformed into text images, which are then in turn changed into digital texts. Therefore, a large amount of documents can be transformed into editable text files. This saves a lot of efforts for manually entering the texts.
To use the OCR technique on paper documents, it is usually necessary to scan the documents into image first. Afterwards, the text inside the image is singled out and rearranged by cutting or merging. Finally, the words are compared and recognized.
It is often the case that the user puts the document upside down when scanning an image. As a result, the image received by the word recognition system may not be right-side up. In this case, the word recognition system has to first detect the orientation of the text in the image, for the convenience of subsequent recognition processes.
In comparison with the English system, where only 26 alphabets are involved, determining the orientation of Chinese words is much more complicated. R.O.C. Pat. No. 206,290 discloses a method for determining the orientation of Chinese words. This method is based on the measurement of spacing between words. However, it has to perform the calculation on the words in the entire document before the orientation can be determined.